Funium Launches Family Village

Press Release

August 23, 2012

Funium announced the launch of its free Facebook game, Family Village, to all Facebook users. In beta testing since April 2011 to fully incorporate player's requested features, Family Village enables players to explore their own family tree while building a virtual, online community associated with the time period in which each of their ancestors lived.

Family Village arrives prepackaged with a host of new features that allow players to personalize their avatars with a more robust character editor, such as adorning their ancestors with period clothing, creating multiple villages across different time periods, collaborating on their family tree with other family members, accessing more types of historical documents via search and explore, and a newly-added family history museum where family information and documents can be accumulated and stored.

Players now have the ability to generate user content, including uploading pictures and documents and fun and interesting stories of family members to the game. The game is notable for its impressive average single-session playtime of 14 minutes, which is nearly triple the industry average.

“We have been looking forward to this release,” said Jeff Wells, CEO of Funium. “Family Village is uniquely positioned in the online gaming arena as the first social game with real-world value. Our game becomes more valuable to the player the longer it is played because of the increased possibilities for the discovery of family history research documents and unknown family members. In addition to the interest received in the U.S., we are excited to penetrate international markets; our game will have massive appeal in Europe and China, in particular, where family history research is a major cultural interest.”

Funium monetizes Family Village not only by offering traditional virtual goods for purchase, but by real historical document sales as well. The company’s founders share a deep history in genealogy, having been involved in Ancestry.com, GeneTree and the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation.

In gameplay, players build businesses, houses, immigrate family members and assign jobs based on the time period in which that family member lived. Family Village then matches that inputted data with relevant real-world documents about the users’ living and deceased relatives. These include newspaper articles, census records and other historical documents; which players can examine or store in their personal game library.